Staff writer Corey Mitchell covers English-language learners, bilingual education and civil rights issues for Education Week. Join him as he explores the educational, policy, and social issues surrounding ELLs in U.S. schools.

English-Learners and Graduation: How ESSA Could Penalize ELLs and Their Schools

By Corey Mitchell on
April 29, 2019 2:30 PM

The nation's federal K-12 law may be penalizing older English-language learners and the schools that educate them, a new report from the Migration Policy Institute argues.

By making four-year graduation rates such a prominent part of school accountability plans, the Every Student Succeeds Act could lead administrators in traditional high schools to turn away older English-learner students who may need additional time to earn their high school diplomas, posits Julie Sugarman, a senior policy analyst with the institute and the report's author.

The report from the institute's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy also examines why high-school age English-learners drop out of school, how graduation rates are calculated, and how a heavy emphasis on graduation rates can affect how schools design instructional programs for English-learners.

While federal law has helped close opportunity gaps for English-learners by requiring schools to document and publicly report on their educational progress, ESSA could "disproportionately categorize English-learners as failures or, more concerningly, incentivize schools to push such students into inappropriate educational pathways or not to serve them at all, for fear of the consequences attached to being labeled as a school in need of improvement," Sugarman writes.

Under ESSA, states must submit school accountability plans that include data from districts on four-year graduation rates. While states can supplement their calculation of the four-year graduation rate with an extended-year rate, 16 states and the District of Columbia have chosen not to, the report finds.

Altogether, those states serve about 60 percent of the nation's estimated 5 million English-learners.

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